Never been one to let the carrier drop

Okay, so as many of you know I’ve got this, well, *thing* about encryption. Not a thing to the point where I sit around and argue about cryptographically random noise, but I like to ponder. So I had this idea that I’m sure has occured to just about everyone at some point:

Use a DVD as a one-time pad.

OKay, so it’s got weaknesses. But, any given CD/DVD probably has just about every bit string you could ask for. You just send your data as a series of offsets and lengths (probably encrypted using some other method just to make things further obfuscated). The person you’re sending the data to knows which movie or CD the offsets and lengths refer to.

Okay, so it’s not so much useful as silly.

S.

(credit to Kayti for finding it)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNl9ESk5t4Y&search=80s%20music

S.

One of the first music videos I ever saw.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwYYkmAtNuE&search=80s%20music

for happy endings, it takes two…

Words that send fear into the heart of every user of debit cards.

My bank recently decided to reissue my debit card as a mastercard instead of a visa – not something that I really understand, but okay – and (grr) turned off my old card without waiting for me to activate my new one. Well, okay, so it’s been like two weeks since I got the letter, but still.. what if I’d been out of the country? I really feel like they ought to keep the card working until the expiration date if it is at all technically possible..

(And now I have to worry about which automatic billing things are broken, too. Grr. Grr. Grr.)

I took a test on the web for ADD today – Cutoff is 20, and I had 61 points. Which may explain why I’m writing a journal entry instead of writing code that needs to be done by tomorrow night.

Figures that I would love this:

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=59040519

this weekend, I will be at the following events:

1) The Art Theives will be playing at Wayne’s World this Friday. I will be providing their sound, as well as doing a multitrack recording of them. They do 70s and 80s covers and originals themed appropriately. Sadly, I will be doing their sound sans the 1232s as they are on their way to MassiveBurn (details).

2) Mischief Committee will be playing a two hour set starting at midnight at Massive Burn. (See above). I will be getting a two-track recording of this event – possibly even a eight-track recording if I get adventurous and figure out how to turn a patch bay into a two way quarter-inch splitter. (I know it’s theoretically possible. I’ve got no bleedin’ idea how to do it, and not a lot of time to figure it out. Also, I’ve got no clue where to get ADAT tapes (aka SVHS tapes) in Seattle. Anyone with any guesses is welcome to post them. Guitar Center *laughed* at the idea.

3) I’ve placed a number of new Mischief Committee recordings up in the archives. Probably the most noteworthy one is: http://www.mischiefcommittee.org/archive/Jun52006-MischiefCommittee.mp3. It’s long, and a lot of it isn’t that good, but it does have some tasty moments. Some of you will also be interested in http://www.mischiefcommittee.org/archive/MadroryMischiefCommittee.mp3, which although it isn’t of quite the same quality, features our good friend Madrory on the guitar.

Additional comment about #2: Actually, guitar center sucks in several particulars now:

a) They aren’t letting their employees spend enough time with the gear – the concept of slaving a delay line to a midi beat clock took me almost ten minutes to explain, with *hand gestures* in spots

b) They don’t have any cheap XLR cables. They don’t have any long XLR cables. In general, the music store that is walking distance from my house has better prices and selection on XLR cables than guitar center.

c) The place is a !ZOO!.

Still, they’re nowhere near as bad as musician’s friend. Nonetheless, when I don’t need something that they don’t stock, I’m still going to buy at Petosa. Well, until I move. Then I’ll find a Petosa clone and shop there instead.

If anyone is looking for a present for me:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Lots-of-36-TIE-DYE-Rubber-Wristband-Bracelets_W0QQitemZ8947826189QQcategoryZ64503QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Someone should really set up a trust fund type arrangement to try and keep hosted web sites on the net for as long as is possible.. have a initial buy in, like say $1000/megabyte, and have some sort of arrangement to invest the money wisely, and use the interest from it to pay for web hosting – so that after people die, their web sites can continue to speak from beyond the grave. (of course, their opinions on things may change after they die.. if so, it should be interesting to see how they manage to update their web sites from wherever it is that they end up.. ah, the eteral mystery..)

I don’t know about Debian, but I recently installed Ubantu, and I’m rapidly falling in love. This is everything gentoo should have been and wasn’t. 😉 Of course, I’m setting up a web server / mysql engine / smbfs server / mail server. And, of course, I’ve only gotten as far as putting it on the net and enabling ssh..

But, check out this machine:

root@chloe:~# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 15G 246M 14G 2% /
varrun 1007M 100K 1007M 1% /var/run
varlock 1007M 4.0K 1007M 1% /var/lock
udev 1007M 92K 1007M 1% /dev
devshm 1007M 0 1007M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb2 1.7T 129M 1.6T 1% /home
/dev/sda2 46G 591M 43G 2% /usr
/dev/sdb1 235G 306M 223G 1% /var

root@chloe:~# cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 2060860 kB
MemFree: 1423404 kB

root@chloe:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 15
model : 47
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3200+
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 2009.167
cache size : 512 KB
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt lm 3dnowext 3dnow pni lahf_lm
bogomips : 4021.77
TLB size : 1024 4K pages
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts fid vid ttp tm stc

Okay, I admit, it’s not the fastest CPU on the market. But still.. 4k bogomips is nothing to sneer at. Although, ironically, Gateway’s lame 1300Mhz Athlon is turning over 2600 bogos.. so maybe bogoMIPS aren’t the best measure of CPU power. Or maybe there’s something else going on.

p.s. it also has a gigabit ethernet interface.

C’mon, someone, drool, already. I know I’m probably running in last place on the ‘who has the most overpowered water-cooled uber-frightening supercomputer’ contest, but 2.1 formatted terabytes.. c’mon, that’s gotta be worth something.. uh.. guys?

I’m definately having a redhat sucks moment. I’ve got a stock RH AS3.5 server that is unable to build its kernel.

Yes, the distributed kernel that comes with the RPMs from redhat (kernel-source-blah-blah-blah) is broken with respect to the default headers such that it’s not possible to build most of the kernel modules.

This shows a impressive level of incompetence on RedHat’s part. THIS is the OS that costs $300 a year? While there are four or five free versions of linux, all of which are capable of compiling their kernal out of the box?

Part of what’s annoying me is the complete lack of anything like useful error messages. Example:

rpmbuild -v -v –rebuild kernel-2.4.spec
Installing kernel-2.4.spec
error: kernel-2.4.spec cannot be installed

Helpful, aren’t they? Set maximum verbosity and all they tell you is that it can’t be installed. Not, you know, WHY or anything..

GRrr..